Elemental Mediations: Art, Cinema, and Performance in Contemporary China

Abstract

Elemental Mediations is an ethnographic study of artists who work in the fields of popular performance, independent cinema, and contemporary art in China. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, I use the concept of “elemental mediation” to frame how various artists work with land and sky as artistic media, and how their practices confront the complex entanglements between transforming physical environments and precarious sociopolitical realities. I show how artists intervene in contestations over rural and urban space, the proliferation of spectacle and consumerism, and restrictions imposed on cultural production by the Chinese state, local authorities, and art institutions. The project assembles a selection of artists working in diverse geographical contexts and artistic media, from the fringes of the entertainment industry in rural Yunnan Province to the emerging center of the Chinese contemporary art world in urban Shanghai.